PNY Pro Elite 500GB Portable SSD Review

The latest edition to the Pro Elite portable SSD lineup hits the lab in the 500GB capacity. Let's check it out.

Published
Updated
Manufacturer: PNY (PSD0CS2060-500-RB)
2 minutes & 17 seconds read time
TweakTown's Rating: 75%

The Bottom Line

The Pro Elite has its issues, but it's not too terrible if you keep your long file transfers to a minimum.

We don't see too many portable storage solutions come out of PNY, so when they mentioned a new drive was ready for market, I immediately had to get my hands-on one.

The Pro Elite appears to be the only portable solution currently in PNY's portfolio. It is a small form factor solution that uses USB 3.2 Gen 2 with a Type-C connection. Capacity options include 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB model, all offering 865 MB/s read and 875 MB/s write per marketing.

Compatibility includes Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms with an MSRP of $79.99 for the 500GB solution in house. This solution is backed by a three-year warranty.

PNY Pro Elite 500GB Portable SSD Review 02

Packaging shares capacity and marketing performance in bold print, an image of the drive up above.

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Unboxing the drive, we have both USB-C and Type-A cables, the drive to the left offers an aluminum exterior with a plastic chassis.

PNY Pro Elite 500GB Portable SSD Review 04

Internally, the Pro Elite has a very interesting build, using two Phison S11 drives in a pseudo RAID mode to reach the 875 MB/s performance level.

PNY Pro Elite 500GB Portable SSD Review 10

CDM is a staple in performance testing; version 7 has seen some updates in the workloads used for testing. Performance for the PNY start outs fresh at 874 MB/s read and 754 MB/s write. 4KQ1 is quite low at 14 MB/s read, and 35 MB/s write.

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We see rather stable performance in ATTO for a RAID setup; the PNY does the best 128K through 64M.

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New to our testing is a 200GB data transfer that aims to weed out drives that lose performance during backup scenarios. In this case, the PNY Pro Elite is quite possibly the worst drive we have seen. It took over an hour to transfer 200GB of data, at a rate of 53 MB/s.

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Price/Performance wasn't too bad; the drive received a score of 89% based on a solid price point.

The Pro Elite is an interesting solution that has solid aesthetics and seemingly average build quality with a few underlying hardware choices that are questionable. In the current market, I think the last drive I reviewed to use this "RAID" design was the Extreme 900 years ago, making this choice seem even odder is PNY using two DRAMless drives.

Performance of the Pro Elite is quite good in sequential canned benchmarks like CDM and ATTO, though ATTO does show some of the erratic behavior. The 200GB file transfer test tanked the Pro Elite from 700 MB/s to 53MB/s within minutes making for an hour-long session waiting for the bench to finish. That said, Price/Performance is rather good for the PNY with a solid market price.

Pricing of the PNY Pro Elite is well within expectations, at $79.99 this solution matches comparable portable SSDs, just be sure to keep your transfers short to limit to the risk of falling off disk cache.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

Photo of product for sale

Performance

70%

Quality

80%

Features

80%

Value

70%

Overall

75%

The Bottom Line

The Pro Elite has its issues, but it's not too terrible if you keep your long file transfers to a minimum.

75%

PNY Pro Elite 500GB Portable SSD

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* Prices last scanned on 3/27/2024 at 1:49 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Tyler joined the TweakTown team in 2013 and has since reviewed 100s of new techy items. Growing up in a small farm town, tech wasn't around, unless it was in a tractor. At an early age, Tyler's parents brought home their first PC. Tyler was hooked and learned what it meant to format a HDD, spending many nights reinstalling Windows 95. Tyler's love and enthusiast nature always kept his PC nearby. Eager to get deeper into tech, he started reviewing.

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